I had a visit from the young theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson this weekend. He pointed me to what looks to be a terrific series of lecture notes by him, about quantum computation. I wish he’d get it published as a book so I don’t have to read it online.

Note the photo of the 2-D shadows on the wall of the Platonic N-D Ru-cave. I used to resist quantum computations, but as an SF writer, it makes more sense to let them into my heart. Quantum computations are as useful to us as radium was for SF writers of the 1930s, and as quarks were in the 1970s!

Speaking of quantum mechanics, Nick Herbert posted an interesting new paper that refutes Bell’s Non-Locality Theorem…for certain kinds of wack worlds.

I was going good on Hylozoic for a few weeks, but now I’m hung up on a bunch of little writing projects. I finished a story with Marc Laidlaw called “The Perfect Wave”, and sidebar article about SynBio biotech futures for the international edition of Newsweek.

And I still have to write an article about cellular automata for Make magazine, and an article about the far future for an anthology called Year Million.

Saturday, Sylvia and I had an all-Mexican day in San Jose. First we saw these great Aztec dancers.

Love the skull.

And then we saw a cool show at the SJ Art Museum by Camille Rose Garcia — not that the main thing about her work is being Latina, she’s totally a California artist from LA. It’s fun to listen to her talk.

To wind up the day we had tacos at Super Taqueria at Tenth and William Street in San Jose. I used to go there a lot when I taught at SJSU. They have the world’s best corn tortillas for their tacos. You get two toritillas, and you leave one in your basket and you can make a second taco out of all the stuff that falls out while you eat your first taco in the first tortilla. The carnitas…ah!

Sunday we went to the Maker Faire near the old racetrack at San Mateo. Rudy Jr.’s gang (he’s a member) Cyclecide was there as a Midway attraction. Jericho was putting up a bicycle driven automatic music tower that plays four electric geetars!

Rudy on a high bike. They had a bullfight and then they had an exciting event where they threw a lot of bicycle tires and pies.

Good, chaotic fun.

I saw my favorite digital sculptor Bathsheba, whom I’ve met before. That wavy cube shape in front really obsesses me, it’s called a gyroid, which is “explained” in a post by the incomparable popularizer of the impossible, John Baez.

Karen Marcelo showed me a robotic knife stabber she made for SRL (Survival Research Labs). She said one of friends had stuck his hand in while it was still moving and he got cut so bad the blood was spurting, poor guy. So then they put in a piece of steak instead. That’s Survival Research Labs for you: “Producing the most dangerous shows on Earth!”

In a kinder, gentler room I saw a giant squid made of Legos.

It was a brutally windy walk to the (wrong) Caltrain station, the world was broken into Lego dots by the wind screen.

Today I got a preview of the August Asimov’s SF cover, with a story by Bruce and me. Makes me feel like a real science fiction writer, which is very satisying, as being an SF writer was my main life ambition all along, starting at age 13.

I did my reading at the SF in SF series last night. Terry Bisson was the MC, Corey Doctorow read a chapter from his upcoming radical YA SF book Little Brother, and then I read “The Imitation Game,” a short story about the last days of computer pioneeer Alan Turing, and about his persecution by the British secret service. This time, Turing wins… My story will appear in the magazine Interzone this summer or fall.

We had a nice crowd, including Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books in the front row. I recorded my segment of the reading and put it online on my Gigadial pages.

I just read an interesting post by Charlie Stross about lifelogging. The ideas overlap a little bit with what I said in my Psipunk talk. Great minds think alike.

Wednesday evening I’ll be reading with Cory Doctorow for Terry Bisson’s SF in SF series at the Variety Theater near 2nd street on Market Street.

I went to see my far-out physicist friend Nick Herbert in Boulder Creek, as I so often do when I’m starting a novel. Nick knows a lot about quantum mechanics; he has this abiding hope/dream that people will some day learn how to communicate directly with matter. He calls this “quantum tantra.” As Nick puts it, our standard scientific experiments are ways of interrogating matter; and our brains are complex quantum-influenced systems; so why not find a way to get it on with matter.

This lies close to my dream of hylozoism and telepathy, so we see eye-to-eye; though for Nick this is more than SF fodder, it’s a serious quest.

Nick has a cactus on his porch looking at itself in a mirror. Collapsing its own wave function.

Nick showed me what he called a Heisentoy, which was a small hand-made fired-clay sculpture that Arne Olafson of Denham Island, British Columbia, had mailed Nick. Nick first opened the box at night, and touched the object without looking at it, and then he got the idea that it would be fun to leave the object’s appearance in a permanently uncertain state.

So he “showed” it to me by handing it to me swathed inside an “anti-viewer” made up of the spandex sleeve of on of his neighbor’s shirts (she liked to cut off her sleeves). It felt like a cube with the edges finger-pinched out like petals, in an irregular pattern.

As we discussed some of the ideas for Hylozoic, we sat in the La Joya cafe in Boulder Creek, formerly the Blue Sun. They were playing the Beatles White Album on the sound system, which I can’t recall having heard played in a public place since the summer of the Manson murders.

As a boy, taking in the info from movies and the comics, I was sure that: I would serve in the army in a war, spend time in a penitentiary, join a lodge. I always liked the sound of IOOF, the International Order of the Odd Fellows, seemingly still flourishing in Boulder Creek.

After lunch we synchronistically ran into a guy on the street who’d worked on the Doubleday Books sales force promoting Billie Craddock’s Be Not Content way back when. The guy said Billie’s editor was Luther Nichols, and that Billie had been under 21 when his early masterpiece was published.

Driving back to Nick’s house, Craddock passed us on the road, on his chopper with the high handelbars. His ghost. A sign. Be Not Content is going to rise again.